AUM Grand Ensemble

Since 2010, AUM grand ensemble, hybrid band between a chamber orchestra, a big band and an ultra-modern gamelan - in the sense of set of resonant instruments that Olivier Messiaen defined - reflects upon a kind of common source of different music traditions - from Renaissance’s musics to the musics of Morton Feldman, Ligeti, Grisey or LaMonte Young, and those, ancestral and innumerable, from Asia. The source of a certain physical, organic sensibility to the sound matter. A music in which composition and improvisation are constantly serving each other, guided by the search of  a living, shifting sound - a music about masses, timbre melting, textures, about processes more than events, reflecting upon the role of the voice, evolution of continuous matters, long forms, non-temperated tunes, the acoustic phenomenon of beats, resonant, silence...
In You've never listened to the wind, beats, resonances or tuning are approached through a totally original point of view by the use of keyboards from an Indonesian gamelan mixed with the instrumentarium of the ensemble.
The music is built around some fragments of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry coming from The Keeper of Sheep, poems that Pessoa wrote, as he liked to relate, during only few hours, a day of march 1914, almost in a trance, filled by his heteronymous Alberto Caïro, who was, according to him, a marginal, at once heir to Lao-Tseu, Milarepa and Socrates. Each of those poems are like a koan, a statement of unlearning, implied by the need to reconnect with the fullness of sensations…